JEW- BAITING 

An Old Evil 

Newly Camouflaged 


HORACE JAMES BRIDGES 



The International Press 

150 LAFAYETTE STREET, 
NEW YORK. 







I 







5 





JEW- BAITING 

An Old Evil 
Newly Camouflaged 


BY 

HORACE JAMES BRIDGES 

Author of “As I Was Saying”, “On Becoming 
an American”, etc. 


(Published by request of the 
Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture) 


v 




* 


INTERNATIONAL PRESS 
150 Lafayette Street 
New York 



Copyright, 1923 

by The International Press, 

NEW YORK 




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C1A761870 


QCT -3 1023 
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ro 


ri 



To 

HARRY D. OPPENHEIMER, 


through friendship with whom I have learned 
a deeper reverence not only for his race 
but for all men. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

CHAPTER I. 

The Revival of Jew-Baiting . 5 

CHAPTER II. 

Mr. Belloc’s Method of Procedure . 12 

CHAPTER III. 

The Pretended Problem . 21 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Jew a Miraculous Exception to the 
Laws of Human Development.-. 27 

chapter v. 

The Ecclesiastical “Spirit Twist” . 33 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Useful “Insinuendo” . 37 

CHAPTER VII. 

Patriotism, Internationalism and Anti-Na¬ 
tionalism . 42 

CHAPTER VIII. 

How Mr. Belloc “-Gets That Way” . 46 

CHAPTER IX. 

“The Wandering Jew in Nineteen Hundred 
Acts/' . 52 

CHAPTER X. 

Church Loyalty Versus National Loyalty . 6t 

chapter XI. 

The Jewish Answer to Mr. Belloc. 69 













CHAPTER I. 

THE REVIVAL OF JEW-BAITING. 

T O my great regret, I find that I am be¬ 
ginning to achieve some measure of 
success as a prophet. I say to my 
regret, because, obviously, the purpose of any 
•well-meaning citizen who utters forebodings 
of coming evil, is to contribute what he can 
towards falsifying his own predictions by 
averting the evils which he dreads. And so, 
in looking over the record of my utterances 
of recent years, I should have far more pleas¬ 
ure and satisfaction if it now appeared that 
my anticipations had been wrong; and still 
more so if I could feel that the warnings I 
had been moved to utter had helped in any 
degree to cause the action which had pre¬ 
vented their fulfilment. 

Nearly four years ago, in a discourse in 
Chicago, in which I ventured to counsel the 
Jews among my hearers against the Zionist 
project of erecting in Palestine a distinctively 
Jewish Nation-State, I grounded my counsel 
in large part upon the apprehension that 
this development would give “to the Western 

5 


6 


Jew-Baiting 


anti-Semite a new handle that he is absolute¬ 
ly certain to take hold of if he is not headed 
off.” This prophecy, the reasons for which 
are self-evident to everybody familiar with 
the anti-Jewish mind, began to find fulfilment 
as soon as it was uttered. And since then 
the evidence of its accuracy in reading the 
situation has multiplied extensively. One 
need point only to such typical exploitations 
of the Zionist argument as Mr. Chesterton’s 
volume, “The New Jerusalem,” and the 
recently published treatise by Mr. Hilaire 
Belloc on “The Jews.” 

Again, some three years ago, after reading 
the mass of accusations (so far as it was 
then published) in furtherance of the anti- 
Jewish campaign associated with the name 
of Mr. Henry Ford, and the parallel pro¬ 
paganda emanating from other countries, such 
as the legendary Protocols and the volume 
based upon them by the Editor of the Lon¬ 
don Morning Post, I ventured a remark in 
public to the following effect: “We cannot 
afford to trust to the probability of this fire 
burning itself out. Many previously in¬ 
credible things have happened in the last 
seven years; and it is by no means impos¬ 
sible that assassination of Jews may be suc¬ 
cessfully instigated by these methods.” Not 


The Revival of Jew-Baiting 7 

very long after my utterance of these words, 
the awful murders of Matthias Erzberger and 
Walther Rathenau in Germany, which marked 
the end of a serious effort at social and 
economic rehabilitation and the beginning 
of intentional financial collapse in that coun¬ 
try, proved that one’s fear had not been 
groundless; especially since these events led 
to the disclosure of a conspiracy to assassinate 
a whole list of prominent German Jews. 

Thdse things, and multitudinous other 
episodes in many countries, make it evident 
that among the flood of evil sequels to the 
war, we have to reckon with a new inunda¬ 
tion of the ancient evil of hatred felt by 
Gentiles against Jews; and the certainty 
that hatred, now as ever, will breed only 
after its own likeness, and bring forth a 
reactive hatred of Jews against Gentiles. 
The evil is already at work, and it would be 
worse than idle to suppose that any good 
purpose could be served by ignoring it or 
keeping silent about it. 

The immediate occasion which has turned 
my thoughts anew to this subject was the 
reading, when I was in Europe last sum¬ 
mer, of the volume already mentioned, by 
Mr. Hilaire Belloc. Although the Houghton 
Mifflin Company have put their name to an 


8 


JeW-BaITI NG 


imported edition, it seems to have had no 
very general sale among us; and, so far 
as I can find, it has attracted comparatively 
little public attention in Great Britain. But 
the wide knowledge, the large experience, and 
the literary skill of its author, coupled with 
the fact that, as a Roman Catholic of the 
extremest ultramontane school, he undoubted¬ 
ly expresses opinions and betrays disposi¬ 
tions widely prevalent among the most in¬ 
fluential members of his Church, give to his 
utterances, on a subject of this kind, a degree 
of importance that is in no wise measurable 
by the statistics of the circulation of his 
volume. The book has all the ability which 
we have learned to expect from Mr. Belloc. 
Indeed one may, without exaggeration, clas¬ 
sify it as a masterpiece. But, unhappily, it 
is a masterpiece of venom and hatred, faintly 
veiled under the camouflage of impartiality 
and candid friendship. 

I cannot refrain from expressing my sur¬ 
prise at the small attention which seems to 
have been accorded, either by Jews or Prot¬ 
estants, to this work of Mr. Belloc’s. Two or 
three years ago, Jews were expressing both 
offence and alarm at the circulation of the 
so-called Protocols. Although these docu¬ 
ments were a clumsy and manifest forgery, 


The Revival of Jew-Baiting 9 

so poorly executed that no moderately in¬ 
structed man could read ten pages in them 
without being convinced of their fictitious 
character, they really did harm enough to 
justify the alarm they provoked. For no 
forgery is too gross, no libel too absurd, to 
impose upon great masses of the public, if 
the masses are predisposed to acceptance of 
the libel or forgery by a prejudice previously 
imbibed against its victims. 

For the same reasons, the Jews of America 
were rightly active in opposition to the 
campaign of falsehoods and still falser half- 
truths inaugurated with the consent of Mr. 
Henry Ford, and fought through the pages 
of his magazine. Again it is true that any 
impartial and moderately informed reader 
could see that this series of articles was the 
work of a modern Titus Oates, a most skil¬ 
ful wielder of the poisoned pen, an artist 
in using language so as to leave the impres¬ 
sion that he had said what he had not quite 
said, and in using hint and suggestion and 
innuendo in lieu of positive actionable state¬ 
ments, to produce false beliefs and hatreds 
in the mind of his readers. The great mass 
of alleged facts assembled by this Titus Oates 
were easily exposed fictions, and the true 
statements he advanced did not justify the 


io Jew-Baiting 

conclusions he intended them to suggest. 
The world-conspiracy of all Jews against 
Western civilization, alleged by him and by 
the Protocols, was something which never 
could have existed save as an hallucination 
in the brain of a lunatic, or as a conscious 
fiction in the mind of a forger. The im¬ 
portance of these things, however, lay not in 
their rational force,—for they had none,— 
but in the fact that they appealed to the 
selfsame temper of hatred and prejudice, 
the selfsame will to persecute, of which they 
were themselves the expression. The or¬ 
ganisers of this campaign were animated by 
a spirit of hatred; and they knew full well 
that in the post-war world, their own spirit 
existed in millions of other men, and needed 
but the slightest spark to kindle it into 
devouring flame. That is why in our coun¬ 
try Jews and Gentiles joined in active con¬ 
demnation of these campaigns of calumny, 
in refutation of their baseless charges, and in 
indignant denunciation of the malevolent 
spirit that prompted them. 

Yet, in the past year, I have seen no 
criticism and heard no alarm expressed, ex¬ 
cept by myself, about this work of Mr. 
Belloc, which is enormously more clever, 
subtle and dangerous than any other piece 


The Revival of Jew-Baiting ii 

of anti-Jewish propaganda within my knowl¬ 
edge. Compared with the effusions of Mr. 
Ford’s hirelings or with the Protocols, it 
seems to me like a “big Bertha,” or the tor¬ 
pedo that sank the Lusitania , measured 
against a schoolboy’s catapult. 



CHAPTER II. 

mr. belloc's method of procedure. 

The author’s air of detachment, of disin¬ 
terested sincerity, is cleverly assumed. Mr. 
Belloc seems to have taken the very course 
charged by Kingsley against Newman and 
so indignantly repudiated by the latter; that 
of “writing a whole sermon [for ‘sermon 
read ‘volume’] for the sake of one single 
passing hint, one phrase, one epithet, one little 
barbed arrow, which.... he delivered un¬ 
heeded, as with his finger tip, to the very 
heart of an initiated hearer, never to be 
withdrawn again.” For what is chiefly no¬ 
ticeable in Mr. Belloc’s volume is the seren¬ 
ity with which it proceeds upon unexamined 
assumptions and begged questions, which are 
revealed less by the special stresses of his 
argument than by passing hints, presupposi¬ 
tions, occasional phrases and epithets. One 
may borrow and paraphrase a little further 
from Kingsley, and describe Mr. Belloc as 
being, if not indeed “the most acute man of 
his generation,” yet a man of rare acuteness, 
having “a specially intimate acquaintance with 
the weaknesses of the human heart,”—and 

12 


Mr. Belloc’s Method of Procedure 13 

still more of the human head,—and therefore 
one cannot suppose him in any wise “blind 
to the broad meaning and the plain practical 
result” of such a book, as he has written. 

Mr. Belloc inscribes upon his title-page, 
in Hebrew, the motto “Peace be to Israel.” 
The essay is ostentatiously dedicated to a 
Jewish lady, “My secretary for many years 
at King’s Land and the best and most in¬ 
timate of our Jewish friends, to whom my 
family and I will always owe a deep debt 
of gratitude.” The entire pose is that of 
the impartial friend of both sides, who thinks 
he sees trouble coming, knows how it may 
be averted, and is anxious, for the benelit 
of all concerned, to head it off. 

In accordance with this attitude, Mr. Bel¬ 
loc is by way of explaining to each side the 
errors of judgment and the consequent mis¬ 
takes of behaviour into which it falls when 
dealing with the other. The Jews are ignorant 
of many facts about the Gentile mind and 
psychology which Mr. Belloc is prepared to 
explain to them; and in their ignorance they 
often behave in ways which, without their 
knowledge, and contrary to their intention, 
give deep offence to the Gentile. And Gen¬ 
tiles, in like manner, unaware of what is 
in the Jew’s mind, not merely misunderstand 


14 


Jew-Baiting 


what he does, but render themselves misun¬ 
derstood by saying and doing many things 
which he takes to be intentionally insulting 
and offensive, though they are really nothing 
of the kind. 

But notice how Mr. Belloc goes about to 
present his brief for the Jew, and what a 
brief it is. He tells the Gentiles that many 
characteristics of the Jew, which to them seem 
faults, are not really faults at all. Often they 
are virtues of Jewish patriotism. The Jew 
is entirely indifferent to the well-being of 
any Gentile community, because what he 
is aiming at is the well-being of his own 
community, the Jewish nation. He will act 
against the national or international interests 
of the land in which he was born. This, 
says the Gentile, is treachery. Not at all, 
answers Mr. Belloc. You only think it is 
because, like a fool, you assume that the 
Jew is, or can be, a citizen of your country. 
What he does would indeed be treachery in 
an Englishman, a Frenchman, an American. 
Being a member of another nation, and act¬ 
ing—often with great courage and self-sac¬ 
rifice—in the interests of that nation, the Jew 
is only doing what you ought to expect of 
him, and what you yourself would be the 
first to applaud as courage or patriotism if 


Mr. Belloc’s Method of Procedure 15 

done by an Englishman or Frenchman in the 
interests of his own people. 

Such is the “defence”; and every word of 
it is a worse and more deeply studied in¬ 
sult to the French or British or American 
citizen of Jewish race than anything in the 
indictment against which the alleged defence 
is entered. The situation would have been 
nearly paralleled if an American citizen of 
German birth had been offered an elaborate 
exculpation for acts committed against the 
United States during the late war, on the 
ground that the criminal was merely display¬ 
ing, naturally and laudably, the virtue of 
German patriotism against the land to which 
he had sworn allegiance. 

And not only does Mr. Belloc thus set 
out from premises which, besides being false, 
convey by their very assumption a mortal 
insult to all the Jews of Western lands. All 
through his book there is a running under¬ 
tone of veiled threats, in the audacious pre¬ 
sentation of which, under a mask of friendly 
warning, Mr. Belloc shows himself a past 
master. Thus on p. 11, after propounding 
what he calls a solution of the Jewish prob¬ 
lem, he says: “If it cannot be solved in 
that way, it certainly cannot be solved in any 
other, and if we do not get peace by this 


16 Jew-Baiting 

avenue, then we are doomed to the perpetual 
recurrence of those persecutions which have 
marred the history of Europe since the first 
consolidation of the Roman Empire/’ (Italics 
mine.) 

Again, at p. 83, Mr. Belloc speaks—quite 
incidentally, and with the guileless air of 
one stating a self-evident and undeniable fact 
—of “the ceaseless conflict between the very 
soul of the Jew and the soul of the society 
around him.” This is the root of a profound 
“subterranean power for contrast, the value 
of which we cannot grasp, but the effects of 
which are only too apparent. And there re¬ 
mains in the minds of those who most rely 
upon this race and of those who most suspect 
them, the sense of an impassable gulf be¬ 
tween them and ourselves.” 

Again, at p. 40: “Everywhere the old ques¬ 
tions are being asked; everywhere the old 
complaints are being raised; everywhere the 
old perils are reappearing.” 

On p. 90, we find Mr. Belloc dealing with 
the attempts made in the Versailles and other 
treaties to secure protection for Jews and 
other victimized minorities in Eastern Europe. 
In this connection our author writes as follows: 

Our politicians have treated the whole affair 
externally and mechanically, merely obeying 
orders without trying to understand. 


Mr. Belloc’s Method of Procedure 17 

The ultimate result of such interference by 
our Western politicians is unhappily certain. 
The last state of the Jews in Eastern Europe 
will be worse than the first. Their sufferings 
will be greater than in the past, and that because, 
instead of acting from attempted comprehension 
and sympathetic comprehension of the Jewish 
difficulties, the politicians, who have acted as the 
senmits of a few wealthy Jews, have merely 
obeyed the orders of these rich men, and have done 
so with the secret reluctance that always accom¬ 
panies self-surrender to a wage. (Italics mine.) 

Observe the series of innuendoes and in¬ 
sults masked beneath these smoothly worded 
sentences. The implications are as follows: 

1. The peace treaties, in so far as they 
related to the Jews, were dictated by “a 
few wealthy Jews.” 

2. The power of those dictating had been 
secured by bribery. 

3. Those bribed were the treaty-makers; 
that is, President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, 
M. Clemenceau, and their colleagues of the 
other Allied nations. 

On page 91, speaking of alleged Jewish 
monopolies, Mr. Belloc says: 

It is an exceedingly dangerous point in the 
present situation. I do not think that the Jews 
have a sufficient appreciation of the risk they 
are running by its development. There is al- 


i8 Jew-Baiting 

ready something like a Jewish monopoly in high 
finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish 
monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit 
trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco 
trade. There is the same element of Jewish 
monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control 
of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, 
quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, 
this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a 
disease. One province after another falls under 
it, and it acts as a most powerful irritant. It 
will perhaps prove the immediate cause of that 
explosion against the Jews which we all dread, 
and which the best of us, I hope, are trying to 
avert. 

These quotations sufficiently illustrate the 
point I am here urging; namely, that Mr. 
Belloc is careful to see to it that the sting and 
point of his book shall lie in what he tacitly 
assumes rather than in what he ventures 
overtly to state. These remarks about mono¬ 
poly, for instance, like those about the treaty¬ 
making politicians and their bribers, con¬ 
stitute a medley of insinuations and masked 
threats which is unaccompanied by any evi¬ 
dence in support of the alleged facts, or any 
citation of the names of those incriminated. 
Mr. Belloc does not dare to specify by name 
the politicians who took the bribes and 
obeyed the orders of the handful of rich Jews, 
or the names of the Jews who gave the or- 


Mr. Belloc’s Method of Procedure 19 

ders. He knows very well that careless 
readers (that is to say, the vast majority of 
readers) will retain in their minds the pith 
of his insinuations, and can safely be trusted 
to forget that they are unsupported by any¬ 
thing more than the hardy and brazen as¬ 
sertion of Mr. Belloc. 

As to the “explosion against the Jews” 
which Mr. Belloc is “trying to avert,” the 
mask wears so thin as to become perfectly 
transparent to any reader attentive enough 
to keep in mind the drift and animus of Mr. 
Belloc’s argument from one page to the 
next. The effect upon such a reader of this 
book as a whole, assuming him to be un¬ 
critical enough to trust the accuracy of all 
Mr. Belloc’s statements, would necessarily be 
to kindle a temper of irremovable suspicion 
and explosive hatred against Jews in general. 
For what Mr. Belloc does is to propound a 
solution for the alleged Jewish problem, which 
no honourable Jew in any free country could 
possibly be willing to accept, and then to 
declare that this is the only possible solution, 
the only alternative to its acceptance being 
a revival and perpetuation of persecution. Mr. 
Belloc, with his bland air of candid and sin¬ 
cere friendship, slaps his Jewish friend upon 
the shoulder, and says, “My dear fellow, let 


20 


Jew-Baiting 


me tell you what you ought to do. The 
matter is very simple. You have only to 
admit that all your life you have been a liar 
and a hypocrite. Admit that, and everything 
will be rosy; pretend to deny it, and the 
chances are you will be assassinated. This 
circumstance I should deplore; but really 
there can be no help for it if you will persist 
in pretending to be a truthful man and a 
patriotic citizen of a Gentile nation.’ 5 That 
is the plain English to which Mr. Belloc’s 
three hundred and odd pages boil down. 


CHAPTER III. 


THE PRETENDED PROBLEM. 

For what, according to Mr. Belloc, is the 
problem, and what the solution? 

The problem is that the Jews are a nation. 
“It is the thesis of this book that the con¬ 
tinued presence of the Jewish nation inter¬ 
mixed with other nations alien to it, presents 
a permanent problem of the gravest char¬ 
acter: that the wholly different culture, tradi¬ 
tion, race and religion of Europe make Eu¬ 
rope a permanent antagonist to Israel, and 
that the recent and rapid intensification of 
that antagonism gives to the discovery of a 
solution immediate and highly practical im¬ 
portance.(Italics mine.) 

Thus Mr. Belloc begins, by taking for 
granted that which he ought to prove. It 
is true that he sometimes forgets that he 
has called the Jews a “nation,” and in these 
lapses of memory speaks of them as a “race.” 
But these occasional deviations from the 
straight path of the argument are not suf¬ 
ficiently numerous, and the inferences based 
upon them are not sufficiently weighty, to 
upset the general course of the conten- 

21 


22 


Jew-Baiting 


tion. We all know perfectly well that 
members of various races can be quite 
harmoniously combined in a single nation. 
Difference of race makes no necessary 
hindrance to community of citizenship and 
whole-heartedness of national loyalty. If it 
did, Mr. Hilaire Belloc could not be a good 
citizen of Great Britain, and the British Em¬ 
pire and the American Republic would be 
impossibilities. We also know, by manifold 
proof, that it is not the factor of race which 
provokes the peculiar feeling against the Jew; 
for there are whole peoples of the same race 
as the Jew, against whom no special prejudice 
is entertained, even by the maddest of the 
so-called anti-Semites. 

It is, then, upon the contention that the 
Jews are a nation that Mr. Belloc builds 
his case. Despite his occasional nodding sub¬ 
stitution of race for nation , he would, I think, 
admit that, as he sees it, race has not really 
anything to do with the question, and neither 
has religion. We err, he declares, in “pro¬ 
claiming it essentially religious, whereas it 
is essentially national.” There would be no 
problem unless, as he declares, we found 
“within one political organism. . . another 
political organism at friction with it.” 

Now, as the world is at present organized, 


The Pretended Problem 23 

every man must needs be a member of 
one nation, and no man can be a mem¬ 
ber of more than one. Whatever may be 
the limits imposed by the nature and the 
rights of conscience upon national loyalty, 
that loyalty must be, within its limits, un¬ 
qualified and undivided. We may be in¬ 
ternationalists in religion or in our social 
ideals; that is, we may desire to bring about 
a state of things in which there will be an 
over-arching unity embracing and preserving 
the distinct individuality and personality of 
all nations. But, whatever our hopes for 
such a development may be, the develop¬ 
ment has not yet taken place; and there¬ 
fore no nation can at present afford to tolerate 
in its citizens any loyalty, of the same or¬ 
der as that which it claims, given to a 
separate and possibly hostile political or¬ 
ganism. 

But Mr. Belloc’s case depends not only 
on the assumption that there is a Jewish 
nation. It also requires the still more audaci¬ 
ous and groundless assumption that of that 
nation every Jew is, and inevitably must be, 
a member. To be a Jew is to be a citizen 
of the Jewish nation, and to cease to be a 
Jew is a sheer impossibility. Consequently, 
wherever Jews are in the world, they con- 


24 


Jew-Baiting 


stitute an alien element, irreducibly different 
from, unassimilable with, and antagonistic 
to their “hosts,” and therefore always more 

or less at friction with them. 

This being the problem, the solution is 
quite easy to indicate, however difficult it 
may be to carry out in practical application. 
It is that Jews everywhere shall regard them¬ 
selves, and by others shall always be regarded, 
as foreigners; accorded, of course, all the 
rights and privileges of foreigners, but sub¬ 
ject to all the limitations and bound to com¬ 
ply with all the special regulations which 
every nation, both by municipal and interna¬ 
tional law, is privileged to impose upon its 
alien residents. 

What would this mean in practice? It 
would mean that the position of Jews in this 
country, and in all the European lands, would 
be identical with the position in which we 
Americans find ourselves when travelling, say, 
in England or Italy. They would be sub¬ 
ject to all kinds of special taxation, but would 
not enjoy, and could never acquire, any right 
of representation in Parliaments or other tax- 
levying bodies. They could not vote. Those 
life-conditions, which in the case of regular 
citizens are recognized as inalienable rights, 
if accorded to Jews at all, would be given 


The Pretended Problem 25 

only as special privileges, revocable at will; 
I mean the right of organization, of liberty 
of conscience and exercise of religious wor¬ 
ship, of holding property, of publication and 
criticism of matters social and political. They 
would be, as Mr. Belloc frankly says, just 
“guests”; that is, wholly dependent upon the 
courtesy of their “host,” who would have an 
indefinite right to prescribe their behaviour, 
and the privilege of turning them out at any 
moment. And all this could never be in¬ 
terfered with under international law or by 
any league of nations, for in every land it 
would be an internal, domestic problem, be¬ 
yond the jurisdiction of any international 
Court or organization. 

Such would be the permanent, unchange¬ 
able position throughout Europe and Amer¬ 
ica, if Mr. Belloc’s blandly tendered solu¬ 
tion of the problem were adopted. It would 
be unchangeable, because he truculently de¬ 
clares that no Jew can ever, by any possibil¬ 
ity, become other than a Jew; that is, be¬ 
come a citizen of another nation. Continu¬ 
ance in the same land for a thousand years 
could never confer upon any Jewish family 
the status of true-born citizens. Mr. Bel¬ 
loc prudently refrains from drawing out these 
practical consequences, but he is fully con- 


26 


Jew-Baiting 


scious of them, and it is for the sake of them 
that he lays down, as the two foundation- 
stones of his structure, the theses that the 
Jews are a nation, and that among all other 
nations individual Jews are merely alien 
guests. 


( 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE JEW A MIRACULOUS EXCEPTION TO THE 
LAWS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. 

This twofold contention constitutes the sub¬ 
stance of Mr. Belloc’s book. I choose al¬ 
most at random a few of the numerous pas¬ 
sages that might be cited in illustration of 
it: 

It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, 
that they alone have maintained, whether through 
the special action of Providence or through some 
general biological or social law of which we are 
ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally un¬ 
failing differentiation between themselves and the 
society through which they ceaselessly move. 
( p . 8 .) 

If the Jewish nation comes to express its own 
pride and patriotism openly, and equally openly 
to admit the necessary limitations imposed by that 
expression; if we on our side frankly accept the 
presence of this nation as a thing utterly 
different from ourselves, but with just as 
good a right to existence as we have; 
if we renounce our pretences in the mat¬ 
ter; if we talk of and recognize the Jewish 
people freely and without fear as a separate 
body; if upon both sides the realities of the 
situation are admitted, with the consequent and 

27 


28 


JEW-B AITING 


necessary definitions which those realities imply, 
we shall have peace. (P. iof.) 

The opposition to it [jc. Mr. Belloc’s state¬ 
ment of the problem and its solution] is diverse 
and formidable, but can everywhere be re¬ 
duced upon analysis to some form of falsehood. 
This falsehood takes the shape of denying the 
existence of the problem, of remaining silent 
upon it, or of pretending friendly emotions in 
public commerce which are belied by every 
phrase and gesture admitted in private. Or it 
takes the shape of defining the problem in false 
terms, in proclaiming it essentially religious 
whereas it is essentially national. Worst of 
all, it may be that very modern kind of false¬ 
hood, a statement of the truth accompanied by 
a statement of its contradiction, like the pre¬ 
cious modern lie that one can be a patriot and 
at the same time international. In the case of the 
Jews, this particular modern lie takes the shape 
of admitting that they are wholly alien to us 
and different from us, of talking of them as such 
and even writing of them as such, and yet, in 
another connection, talking and writing of them 
as though no such violent contrast were pre¬ 
sent. That pretence of reconciling contradic¬ 
tions is the lie in the soul. Its punishment is 
immediate, for those who indulge it are blinded. 

(P. I2f,) 

The foregoing citations leave nothing to be 
desired in point of lucidity. The first of 
them betrays the real animus which accounts 
for Mr. Belloc’s tone throughout the volume. 


The Jew a Miraculous Exception 29 

He does certainly believe that the “unfail¬ 
ing entity’’ and “unfailing differentiation” 
between themselves and other peoples, which 
he says the Jews maintain, are due to “the 
special action of Providence.” It is true 
that we know comparatively little about the 
general psychological and social laws in terms 
of which human society evolves, but at least 
we know that the process which takes place 
in the terms of these laws is invariably one 
of differentiation to secure adaptation to en¬ 
vironment. “To live is to change,” said 
Newman. If there be any people which 
amid the vicissitudes and perpetual environ¬ 
mental changes of two thousand years has 
maintained its original entity intact and un¬ 
modified in the least degree, this can be 
accounted for only by sheer miracle. And 
assuredly there is no people which has under¬ 
gone so many experiences, simultaneous and 
successive, of changed environment, or upon 
whose power of adaptation such great and 
manifold strains have been imposed, as the 
Jews. Yet Mr. Belloc would have us be¬ 
lieve that two thousand years of this in¬ 
tensely difficult business of adaptation, not 
to a European environment but to all the 
numerous and constantly changing environ¬ 
ments of Europe, have left no mark what- 


30 


Jew-Baiting 


ever upon the Jews. The good men amongst 
them are exactly such as they would have 
been had they been the immediate sons, 
instead of the indefinitely remote descendants, 
of the pre-exilic Hebrew prophets and pietists; 
the scoundrels among them are exactly what 
they would have been had they received their 
psychic, mental and moral make-up by first¬ 
hand transmission from Judas Iscariot and 
Barabbas. 

Now we must insist on the fact, obvious 
though it be, that Mr. Belloc is gratuitously 
invoking miracle to explain a phenomenon 
that does not exist. The alleged persistent 
identity of every Jew with every other, and 
of all together with their remote Palestinian 
ancestors, is a pure myth, a sheer figment of 
Mr. Belloc’s brain. Jews born, educated and 
domiciled through life in Russia, Germany, 
France and England, are just about as dif¬ 
ferent from one another as are Russians, Ger¬ 
mans, Frenchmen and Englishmen. Mr. Bel¬ 
loc himself is eloquent about the capacity of 
Jews to mould themselves in externals to the 
colour and tone of the society in which they 
live. But he pretends that this is a mere 
device of self-protective surface adaptation, 
and that underneath it you find in every 
case the same old Jew, absolutely identical, 


The Jew a Miraculous Exception 31 

psychically and spiritually, with his co-na¬ 
tionals of the most different land. Like the 
chameleon, the more he changes the more 
he’s the same thing. Mr. Belloc never could 
have made such a statement if he had had 
experience of the strong antipathies felt and 
expressed by Jews of different nationalities 
against Jews of other lands than their own. 
Whatever he may pretend to the contrary, 
there are plenty of British and American 
Jews who feel towards German and Rus¬ 
sian Jews exactly as Britishers and Am¬ 
ericans feel towards Germans and Rus¬ 
sians ; they feel towards them as foreigners, 
and speak of them as such. One friend of 
mine, a British-born Jew, now an American 
citizen, asked his women relatives in Great 
Britain why they had all married Gentiles, 
and whether they might not have preferred 
to marry Jews. The spontaneous reply was, 
“Well, you see, we couldn't marry foreigners.” 
This is what we should naturally expect; 
it is, indeed, what Mr. Belloc perforce con¬ 
cedes to be the normal working of human 
nature; so that when he wants to deny it in 
the case of the Jew, he is obliged to falsify 
the actual facts and resort to an imaginary 
miracle. 

Thus crumbles the first of our author’s 


32 


Jew-Baiting 


foundation-stones. Not being what he says 
they are, Jews naturally cannot do what 
he suggests they should do. However proud 
a man of Jewish origin may feel of his an¬ 
cestry and of the contribution to civiliza¬ 
tion which the Jews have made, he cannot 
express pride and patriotism for a nation 
that does not exist. Not being a member 
of such a nation, he cannot be expected to 
express pride in it or to admit “the neces¬ 
sary limitations imposed by that expression.” 


CHAPTER V. 


THE ECCLESIASTICAL “SPIRAL TWIST.” 

t .. 

The passage I have cited from his twelfth 
page is a precious illustration of Mr. Belloc’s 
mental attitude and his conception of the 
ethics of controversy. He takes a couple of 
hundred words to say, “If you don’t agree 
with me, you are a liar.” He gives notice 
in advance that anybody who shall venture, 
as I am doing, to question the assumptions 
from which he sets out, and to reject the 
conclusions to which they lead him, must 
have a lie in his soul, and by consequence 
have incurred the blindness which is its 
immediate punishment. 

This kind of argument, like much else in 
Mr. Belloc’s peculiar mentality, is reminiscent 
of the theological controversies of several cen¬ 
turies ago. It denotes an attitude no longer 
possible except to a certain kind of Roman 
Catholic controversialist. Men who believe 
that infallibility walks the earth, are very 
apt to slip unconsciously into the assumption 
that some measure of that attribute attaches 
to themselves. At all events, they feel that 
they cannot err when affirming and reasoning 

33 


34 


Jew-Baiting 


from beliefs to which infallible sanction has 
been given. Mr. Belloc, therefore, is not 
aware of the breach of intellectual morals, 
to say nothing of good manners, which he 
commits when he writes a bullying paragraph 
like the one I have quoted. The state of 
mind which enables a man to say “All who 
disagree with me are liars, and therefore 
have been blinded,” may be an enviable one, 
but it is one that renders decent and ra¬ 
tional discussion impossible. Happily, how¬ 
ever, there is in America a great fair-minded 
audience—including large numbers of Roman 
Catholics—which can be trusted to perceive 
immediately the radical viciousness of Mr. 
Belloc’s attitude. Such readers will require, 
before accepting his conclusions, something 
more than these displays of lofty insolence 
and conscious superiority, and will refuse 
to assume that any gainsayer of Mr. Belloc 
must be astray because that gentleman has 
branded him, by anticipation, as either a 
conscious or a self-deceived falsifier. 

Not having been trained in my distinguish¬ 
ed opponent’s school, I feel no impulse to 
retort upon him the insult he has inclusively 
levelled at me. I believe in Mr. Belloc’s 
honesty of conscious purpose. But I do ven¬ 
ture to think that there is a kink in his 


The Ecclesiastical “Spiral Twist” 35 

mentality and mode of ethical thinking, im¬ 
parted thereto by the Jesuitical training he 
has received, which distorts his judg¬ 
ment of moral issues and his controversial 
ethics, and leads him to use historical and 
other facts in ways inconsistent with the 
single-minded pursuit of truth. There are 
many matters which to the infallibilist are 
foregone conclusions, but which disinterested 
research must regard as open questions. This 
is the difference between the jesuitical mind 
and that greatest glory of Roman Catholic 
scholarship, the late Lord Acton. It is a mis¬ 
fortune to the world that Mr. Belloc’s great 
powers were not developed in Acton’s school. 

Mr. Belloc’s analysis of the Jewish problem, 
which seems to me to illustrate exactly the 
peculiar twist in his mental nature, is not 
presented as an overt and deliberate insult 
to Jewish citizens of the Western lands. But 
nobody who knows the author’s shrewd, well- 
informed, hectoring, dogmatic, and radically 
biased mind, can for a moment suppose that 
he did not see and did not intend the gross 
insult which he has thus masked. For what 
is the inevitable inference from all this talk 
about the Jewish “nation” and the “alien 
minorities” which Jews always constitute in 
other nations? 


36 


Jew-Baiting 


The inference is, and is meant to be, that 
every profession of loyalty, every oath of al¬ 
legiance, ever made by any Jew to France, 
Britain, America, or any Western land, was 
a deliberate and conscious lie. Every act of 
patriotism performed by Jews in the service of 
these lands has been either hypocritical or 
else the stoical acceptance of blind fate by 
persons devoid of any real interest in the 
cause they had espoused. Jews may die in 
battle, as so many of them did in every 
army in the late war; but the cause is not 
their own, not sacred to them. Their state 
of mind was, in all cases, different from 
that of the patriots of the various lands, who 
fought and died as men sacrificing all for 
hearth and home, for God and country. Such 
is the unescapable logic of Mr. Belloc’s posi¬ 
tion, and we cannot insult his alert intel¬ 
ligence by supposing that he did not see 
and intend the inference. 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE USEFUL “iNSINUENDO.” 

Animated by the same prejudice, Mr. 
Belloc writes as follows (p. 93) with further 
reference to Jewish monopoly in Great Bri¬ 
tain: 

The great war brought thousands upon thou¬ 
sands of educated men (who took up public 
duties as temporary officials) up against the 
staggering secret they had never suspected—the 
complete control exercised over things absolutely 
necessary to the nation’s survival by half a dozen 
Jews, who were completely indifferent as to 
whether we or the enemy should emerge alive 
from the struggle. (Italics mine.) 

Here again we perceive how remarkably 
useful Mr. Belloc finds his trick of leaving 
the wildest accusations unsupported by cita¬ 
tion of facts or the names of those assailed. 
To the plain man it would seem that if 
“thousands upon thousands of educated men’* 
know the fact Mr. Belloc affirms, and are in 
a position to specify the names of the half- 
dozen Jewish traitors who completely con¬ 
trolled commodities necessary to Britain’s sur¬ 
vival, then those traitors should long ago 
have either been jailed for life or executed 
for high treason. Why are the educated thou- 

37 ' 


38 


Jew-Baiting 


sands so strangely silent in face of their 
manifest duty? No nation would leave dan¬ 
gerous traitors at large if it really knew what 
Mr. Belloc professes to know. If he really 
has this knowledge, it is his duty as a British 
patriot to bring it to the attention of the 
public authorities of his country. Should 
these (being bought , as Mr. Belloc politely 
suggests his Government is, by the traitors 
in question) refuse to perform their duty, 
then he has only to start a public agitation, 
inaugurated by a complete disclosure of the 
facts and the names of those concerned. The 
British public has never conspicuously lacked 
the instinct of self-preservation, and if per¬ 
suaded of the truth of Mr. Belloc’s charges, 
it would promptly sweep from office any 
Government which refused to discharge its 
plainest and most vital duty. 

Not having open to me the occult sources 
of information upon which Mr. Belloc draws, 
I cannot presume to say whether it is or is 
not true that any vital war commodities in 
Great Britain were monopolized by Jews. 
But even if this were so, the fact would be im¬ 
mensely far from justifying the monstrous 
assertion that those British Jews were “com¬ 
pletely indifferent” to the issue of the war. 
That kind of statement is consistent with 


The Useful “Insinuendo” 39 

unfounded assumptions like Mr. Belloc’s, but 
utterly remote from the realities of life as 
ordinary men experience them. And Mr. 
Belloc himself, on an earlier page, has spoken 
of the war as being something “with which 
the Jews had nothing to do, and which 
their more important financial representatives 
did all they could to prevent” 

This is an important admission. Even if 
we grant, for the moment, the fantastic 
fabrication that the Jews are a nation, and 
that every Jew is loyal to the Jewish nation 
only, it still would be a non-sequitur to in¬ 
fer that Jews were indifferent to the out¬ 
come of the struggle. For on that assump¬ 
tion (and with assumptions only are we 
dealing, not with facts) the attitude of Jews 
would necessarily have been dictated by their 
estimate of the treatment they were likely 
to receive from the victorious side, and of 
the measure of control they could count upon 
exercising over the victors. 

Now, Russia apart, it is a fact which “leaps 
to the eyes” that in the Allied countries the 
treatment of Jews has been vastly more liberal 
than in the former Central Empires. The 
disposition of Jews, therefore,—on the as¬ 
sumption of their complete indifference to 
anything but their own national interests,— 


40 


Jew-Baiting 


would have been to side with Britain, t ranee 
and Italy, and later with America, against 
Germany and Austria. 

Or, to take the other consideration, as to 
the amount of control they might hope to 
exercise, this would have led them to the 
same conclusion. For does not Mr. Belloc 
insist (a) that the Jews tried to prevent the 
war, but could not, and (b) that in the mak¬ 
ing of the Versailles Treaty they were able 
to exercise dictatorial control over the Allied 
politicians, who functioned only as their 
bribed instruments? What then can this 
mean, except that the Jews could control the 
Allies but could not control the pre-war Ger¬ 
many and Austria? Accordingly, still reason¬ 
ing from Mr. Belloc’s imaginative premises, 
we cannot escape the conclusion that instead 
of being indifferent to the outcome of the 
conflict, his mythical Jewish nation would 
have had the strongest practical reasons for 
desiring an Allied victory. 

Mr. Belloc’s assertion, then, that the Jews 
of Great Britain were completely indifferent 
to the outcome of the conflict, shows how, 
under the influence of his flaming prejudice, 
he cannot even adhere consistently to the re¬ 
quirements of the assumptions which that 
prejudice dictates to him. This is the kind 


The Useful “Insinuendo” 41 

of insult to Jews in general that runs through¬ 
out the book and is but faintly concealed 
under every line of it. He would, of course, 
say also that, just as British Jews had no 
concern for Britain’s fate, so German and 
Austrian Jews were callous to the fate of 
those lands. I do not find this overtly stated. 
It might have been said with much less 
violence to Mr. Belloc’s premises than his 
statement about British Jews involves. But 
it is not easy to see how Mr. Belloc, having 
said the one thing, could avoid saying the 
other. For, according to him, the loyalty of 
the Jew is given wholly and solely to his 
own nation; and it is one of Mr. Belloc’s 
pet theses that one cannot be “a patriot and 
at the same time international.” His declara¬ 
tion that this notion of combining patriotism 
with internationalism is “a precious modern 
lie,” is one of the urbane remarks by the way 
which he throws in at frequent intervals to 
buttress his shaky case against the Jews. 


CHAPTER VII. 


PATRIOTISM, INTERNATIONALISM AND 
ANTI-NATIONALISM. 

Incidental as it is to his argument, we can¬ 
not afford to let this pass without a moment’s 
consideration. For this principle of the mu¬ 
tual exclusiveness of patriotism and interna¬ 
tionalism is the cardinal heresy of jingoism. 
It underlies the abominable doctrine of “My 
country, right or wrong.”* If it were true, 
it would rule out of the held of possibility 
any organization of the world in which com¬ 
mon counsel and judicial decision should do 
away with the causes of war. The matter 
is confused in the thinking of many men be¬ 
cause they unconsciously assimilate two ra¬ 
dically different alternatives to the present 
strife of egoistic nations, using one name 
for both, without becoming aware that two 
are covered by it. These two conceptions are 
internationalism and anti-nationalism. 

Obviously, one cannot be at the same time 
a patriot and an anti-nationalist. So when 
anti-nationalists present their doctrine wrong- 

*1 may be permitted to refer the reader to an analysis of 
this maxim in my book “On Becoming an American." 
(Marshall Jones, Boston, 1919 .) 

42 



Patriotism and Internationalism 43 

ly labelled as internationalism, those who do 
not see through the confusion are not to be 
blamed for thinking that internationalism ex¬ 
cludes patriotism. It happens that the ablest 
contemporary advocate of anti-nationalism 
is the man whose words reach the greatest 
number of readers throughout the English- 
speaking world. I refer, of course, to Mr. H. 
G. Wells, whose facile schemes of world-re¬ 
organization deliberately propose the oblitera¬ 
tion of all the physical and psychic frontiers 
between nations, with a view to the merging 
of all races and peoples in one homogeneous, 
undifferentiated human mass, and the placing 
of the whole under the dominance of a world- 
government, which is to administer, as he ex¬ 
plicitly says, “not international law, but 
world law.” So long as this anti-psycholog¬ 
ical, unhistorical, and wildly impossible dream 
of Mr. Wells is permitted falsely to usurp 
the title of internationalism, there is excuse 
for the mistake which Mr. Belloc makes, 
though it is none the less astonishing to see 
it made by a man of his ability. 

But internationalism is the exact opposite 
of that which Mr. Wells advocates. It is 
the ideal which contemplates ordering peace¬ 
fully, and to the end of mutual furtherance, 
the relations among nations; and no man can 


44 


Jew-Baiting 


believe in such a scheme unless he first be¬ 
lieves in the enduring entity of the terms 
which are to be embraced and harmonized in 
the proposed system of relations. I cannot 
offer to the world, as a scheme for improving 
the relations between families, a program of 
which the first requirement is that all families 
are to be merged in the State breeding-sta¬ 
tions and nurseries of Plato’s dream-common¬ 
wealth. Nor would the public listen patiently 
to a project for bringing about better rela¬ 
tions among universities, if its first sugges¬ 
tion were the merging in one of Harvard, 
Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and all the other 
institutions of higher learning in the country, 
under the governance of a single board of re¬ 
gents, for the avowed purpose of extinguish¬ 
ing their individuality. 

Now, the difference between internation¬ 
alism and Mr. Wells’s anti-nationalism is pre¬ 
cisely as huge, gross and palpable as the 
difference between name used and thing in¬ 
tended in these parallels with family and 
university. 

This being the case, Mr. Belloc’s notion 
of the incompatibility between patriotism and 
internationalism is visibly the exact opposite 
of truth. What he calls “the precious modern 
lie” that one can be a patriot and an interna- 


Patriotism and Internationalism 45 

tionalist, is a perfectly sober fact. Only the 
patriot can be an internationalist. For it is 
only he who cares intensely for the nation as 
such, regarding it as an enduring organ of 
humanity, a permanent mode of organiza¬ 
tion, inexpressibly valuable as a condition of 
realizing the many ways in which mankind 
fulfils itself, who will care enough about the 
nation to labor for a right system of rela¬ 
tions. That right system will be one in 
which the distinct individuality and person¬ 
ality of each nation will be not only integral¬ 
ly preserved but enhanced and intensified; 
but at the same time each will find its ful¬ 
filment, not at the expense of others, but by 
contributing to the enhancement of the well¬ 
being of all the rest. Such is the noble doc¬ 
trine of internationalism developed by Maz- 
zini, one of the most earnest internationalists 
and clearest-headed patriots of the nine¬ 
teenth century.* But Mazzini is a man 
whom Mr. Belloc’s preconceptions and fore¬ 
gone conclusions compel him to hate, and 
he therefore can never do justice to Mazzini’s 
philosophy, or see the truth and cogency of 
his greatest doctrine. 


♦“Nations are the citizens of humanity, as individuals 
are the citizens of the nation. And as every individual 
lives a twofold life, inward and of relation, so do the 



CHAPTER VIII. 


HOW MR. BELLOC “GETS THAT WAY.” 

It seems necessary to attempt some ex¬ 
planation of Mr. Belloc’s state of mind and 
will. Why should he, a scholar, a thinker, 
a traveler who has seen much of the world, 
and a man who undoubtedly desires what he 
believes to be for the well-being of humanity, 
have taken this attitude of masked but im¬ 
placable hostility against a numerically in¬ 
significant minority, who could never, even 
if {per impossibile) they were united against 
civilization, constitute a serious danger to 
the nations? 

The answer, I think, is given us when we 
remember Mr. Belloc’s religious and philos¬ 
ophical standpoint, and his national and ed¬ 
ucational antecedents. That we may do him 
the justice he refuses to others, we must 
remember that doctrines, which to us seem 
so manifestly incredible that we cannot un¬ 
derstand a clear-headed man holding them, 

nations. As every individual should strive to promote 
the power and prosperity of his nation through the ex¬ 
ercise of his special function, so should every nation, in 
performing its special mission according to its special 
capacity, perform its part in the general work, and pro¬ 
mote the progressive advance and prosperity of human¬ 
ity.”—Mazzini, Works, vol. v, p. 274 . 

46 


How Mr. Belloc “Gets That Way” 47 

are to him the very heart of truth and the 
very life of his soul. Mr. Belloc is not only 
a Roman Catholic, but has been jesuitically 
trained and stands with the most intransigent 
ultramontane party. He not only accepts 
eagerly the doctrine of the Pope’s infallibility, 
but believes also in the claims of the Papacy 
to temporal domination. That is why he 
hates Mazzini, the inaugurator and idealistic 
inspirer of the movement for Italian national 
unity, which could not reach its goal save 
by the overthrow of that intolerable ana¬ 
chronism, the ecclesiastical government of the 
Papal States. 

Believing in thoroughgoing Papalism with 
the same unhesitating certitude with which 
Alva and Torquemada believed in persecution, 
Mr. Belloc loathes and despises, with an in¬ 
tensity almost impossible for us to realize, 
all the forms of Christianity except his own, 
and the Jewish religion more intensely still. 
The very existence of the doctrine and cult 
of Judaism as a living faith, is in his eyes 
not merely an historical anachronism, but 
a standing horror, a terrific portent, a cancer 
upon the spiritual body of Europe and Am¬ 
erica, a provocative of the wrath of God. 
To him, Roman Catholicism and civilization 
are synonymous. That is why, in the very 


48 


Jew-Baiting 


first paragraph of his book, he declares that 
Europe is a “permanent antagonist” to Israel. 
That is why, again, he speaks of the “cease¬ 
less conflict between the very soul of the 
Jew and the soul of the society around him.” 
Readers who fail to detect that by “the soul 
of the society around him” Mr. Belloc means 
the Roman Catholic Church, will understand 
neither his language nor its ill-repressed ve¬ 
hemence. To him, all the ills of the modern 
world are resolvable into “heresy”; meaning 
thereby Protestant private judgment and de¬ 
parture from the unity of the Roman Church. 
Between the Roman dogmatic system and 
the relatively free ethical monotheism of 
Israel, there is of course a ceaseless conflict, 
just as there is between the fundamental 
demands of Vaticanism and those of dem¬ 
ocracy. But the question whether this con¬ 
flict is identical with one between Judaism 
and the soul of Western civilization, depends 
upon whether we agree with Mr. Belloc in 
holding that the Roman Church, with its in¬ 
fallible autocrat, is that soul. 

This question we cannot debate here. I 
have time only to point out what lies be¬ 
hind Mr. Belloc’s words and supplies his 
animus. This I do because many of his 
readers are unaware of the fact that his 


How Mr. Belloc “Gets That Way” 49 

entire intellectual life has been spent in fer¬ 
vent propaganda on behalf of his Church, 
just as truly as though he had been a mis¬ 
sionary priest of the Society of Jesus. It is 
because he lives for the glory of his Church 
and by its doctrines, that he finds his soul 
revolted by the very existence of Jews and 
Judaism. That is the underlying reason 
why he is so keen to get as many Jews as 
possible packed off out of Europe and Amer¬ 
ica, and those who remain reduced to the 
status of aliens. He really does believe that 
the Jews lie under a special curse of God. 
Hazy-minded men may hold those doctrines 
of the Roman Church from which this be¬ 
lief of Mr. Belloc’s logically follows, and at 
the same time, failing to draw the inference, 
may good-naturedly regard their Jewish neigh¬ 
bors much as they do the rest of humanity. 
Not so your logical ultramontane. Mr. Bel¬ 
loc in this matter combines the intensity with 
the narrowness of the fanatic, and applies 
ruthlessly the hard, metallic, inhuman logic 
of that strange being, the sincere, conscien¬ 
tious persecutor. 

Now if there is any lesson which the ex¬ 
perience of two thousand years places be¬ 
yond the possibility of doubt, it is that race 
prejudice and religious prejudice are the dead- 


50 


Jew-Baiting 


liest poisons in civilization. Wherever either 
of them exists alone, it produces effects such 
as are naturally traceable to any form of 
moral insanity. But where the two exist in 
combination, their evils are not merely added 
but multiplied together, and their effects are 
always and everywhere inhuman, anti-human 
and diabolical. 

Those of us who, from motives of humanity 
and regard for the teachings of history, set 
ourselves to battle against these forms of 
prejudice, are not given over to the illusion 
that there are no differences between races 
and nations. On the contrary, some of us 
at least believe in the induplicable uniqueness 
of every human soul, in the differentiated 
and distinctive genius of every human col¬ 
lectivity, racial or national. But the recogni¬ 
tion of difference can never, among civilized 
men, be an occasion for antipathy. The rule 
should be, in the spirit of Hamlet, to give 
welcome to the stranger as such. The very 
reason for believing in nationalism, and con¬ 
sequently in internationalism, is that from 
every collectivity there is to be anticipated 
some achievement that no other could com¬ 
pass. The total deed of man must be in¬ 
complete if any one of these irreplaceable con¬ 
tributions is omitted. To destroy, therefore, 


How Mr. Belloc “Gets That Way” 51 

any of these natural organs of the universal 
spirit is a crime, not only against the moral 
imperatives governing human relations, but, 
so to say, against the Holy Ghost; that is, 
against the universal mind and will, whereof 
every man and nation is but a partial ex¬ 
pression. 


CHAPTER IX. 


“the wandering jew in nineteen hundred 

acts/' 

Now, there is no people which has suffered 
so intensely or so continuously from both 
these forms of suicidal prejudice, as the Jews. 
Race antagonism against them, as Mr. Bel¬ 
loc frequently reminds us, was rampant in 
the Roman Empire before the days of Chris¬ 
tianity. For evidence of its existence else¬ 
where, no extensive research is needed; the 
Old Testament supplies it. The book of 
Esther may be only a work of fiction, but, 
like many another product of literary imagina¬ 
tion, it is soundly historical of the state of 
public opinion and feeling at the time in 
which it was written: 

Haman said unto King Ahasuerus, “There is 
a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed 
among the people in all the provinces of thy 
kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all 
people, neither keep they the king’s laws; there¬ 
fore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them. 
If it please the king, let it be written that they 
may be destroyed; and I will pay ten thousand 
talents of silver to the hands of those who have 
the charge of the business, to bring it into the king’s 
treasuries”. And the king said unto 


52 



The “Wandering Jew” 


53 


Hainan, “The silver is given to thee, the people 
also, to do with them as it seemeth good to thee.” 

Here we have the earliest version of the 
perennial story of which Mr. Belloc’s argu¬ 
ment is the latest redaction: the same old 
prejudice justifies itself by the same old al¬ 
legations. “These people are foreigners, with 
a corporate life and a law and a loyalty of 
their own. Therefore they cannot be counted 
as citizens of the lands in which they live, 
and their Gentile neighbors and governors 
cannot trust them.” So we find it in the 
Old Testament; and the novelist of Esther 
was but expressing a feeling that we know 
from other sources to have prevailed widely 
in the pre-Christian Roman Empire. Even 
the humane and noble Seneca, if the fragment 
quoted by St. Augustine be really his, felt 
and expressed himself in similar strain when 
protesting against the adoption of Jewish holi¬ 
days and customs: “Usque eo sceleratissimae 
gentis consuetudo convaluit, at per omnes 
iam terras recepta sit: victi victoribus leges 
dederunt.”* 

But pagan Rome, however intolerant of 
what was thought to be a rival national or 

* “The custom of this worst of peoples is so prevalent 
that it is received through all lands; the defeated have 
given laws to the victors.” 



54 


J ew-Baiting 


political loyalty, was widely tolerant of rel¬ 
igious differences. If only the Jews would 
have been good citizens, as Rome understood 
good citizenship,—if only they and the early 
Christians would have performed the simple 
act which Rome imposed as a test not of 
religious belief but of civic loyalty,—they 
would never have been disturbed on account 
of their ideas of God. The refusal of the 
salutation to the Imperial statue was held 
an evidence not of religious heresy, but of 
enmity to a the human race.” In this respect 
Catholicized Rome was totally different. Far 
more tolerant than the pagan Empire of 
political differences and rival State loyalties, 
it was murderously intolerant of unsanction¬ 
ed interpretations of Christian doctrine, still 
more of rejection of the Christian evangel. 
Between this attitude of the Church and the 
antipathy of secular governments and societies 
to their social ideals and industrial habits, 
the Jews have been ground as between upper 
and nether millstones. They have endured 
the utmost diabolism of the combination of 
religious with racial prejudice. I shall cite 
only one of the thousand historically true 
stories of the broken faith and inhuman 
malice which they have endured; and I take 
it not from a partisan, but from one of the 


55 


The “Wandering Jew” 

fairest and most moderate of historians, Mr. 
Lecky:— 

The persecution of the Jewish race dates from 
the very earliest period in which Christianity 
obtained the direction of the civil power; and. 
although it varied greatly in its character and its 
intensity, it can scarcely be said to have definitely 
ceased till the French Revolution. Alexander II, 
indeed, and three or four other Popes, made noble 
efforts to arrest it, and more than once interposed 
with great courage, as well as great humanity, to 
censure the massacres; but the priests were usual¬ 
ly unwearied in inciting the passions of the people, 
and hatred of the Jew was for many centuries a 
faithful index of the piety of the Christians. Mas¬ 
sacred by thousands during the enthusiasm of the 
Crusades and of the War of the Shepherds, the 
Jews found every ecclesiastical revival, and the 
accession of every sovereign of more than usual 
devotion, occasions for fresh legislative restric¬ 
tions. Theodosius, St. Louis, and Isabella the 
Catholic—who were probably the three most 
devout sovereigns before the Reformation—the 
Council of the Lateran, which led the religious 
revival of the thirteenth century, Paul IV, who 
led that of the sixteenth century, and above all the 
religious orders, were among their most ardent 
persecutors. Everything was done to separate 
them from their fellow-men, to mark them out 
as the objects of undying hatred, and to stifle 
all compassion for their sufferings. They were 
compelled to wear a peculiar dress, and to live 
in a separate quarter. A Christian might not 


56 


Jew-Baiting 


enter into any partnership with them; he might 
not eat with them; he might not use the same 
bath; he might not employ them as physicians; 
he might not even purchase their drugs. Inter¬ 
marriage with them was deemed a horrible pol¬ 
lution, and in the time of St. Lewis any Chris¬ 
tian who had chosen a Jewess for his mistress 
was burned alive. Even in their executions they 
were separated from other criminals, and till the 
fourteenth century, they were hung between two 
dogs, and with the head downwards. According 
to St. Thomas Aquinas, all they possessed, being 
derived from the practice of usury, might be 
justly confiscated, and if they were ever permitted 
to pursue that practice unmolested, it was only be¬ 
cause they were already so hopelessly damned, 
that no crime could aggravate their condition. 

Insulted, plundered, hated, and despised by all 
Christian nations, banished from England by 
Edward I., and from France by Charles VI., they 
found in the Spanish Moors rulers who, in addition 
to that measure of tolerance which is always pro¬ 
duced by a high intellectual culture, were probably 
not without a special sympathy for a race whose 
pure monotheism formed a marked contrast to 
the scarcely disguised polytheism of the Spanish 
Catholics; and Jewish learning and Jewish genius 
contributed very largely to that bright but tran¬ 
sient civilization which radiated from Toledo and 
Cordova, and exercised so salutary an influence 
upon the belief of Europe. But when, in an ill- 
omened hour, the Cross supplanted the Crescent 
on the heights of the Alhambra, this solitary refuge 
was destroyed, the last gleam of tolerance vanished 


The “Wandering Jew” 


57 


from Spain, and the expulsion of the Jews was 
determined. 

This edict was immediately due to the exertions 
of Torquemada, who, if he did not suggest it, at 
least by a singular act of audacity overcame the 
irresolution of the Queen; but its ultimate cause 
is to be found in that steadily increasing popular 
fanaticism which made it impossible for the two 
races to exist together. In 1390, about a hundred 
years before the conquest of Granada, the 
Catholics of Seville, being excited by the eloquence 
of a great preacher, named Hernando Martinez, 
had attacked the Jews’ quarter, and murdered 4,000 
Jews, Martinez himself presiding over the mas¬ 
sacre. About a year later, and partly through 
the influence of the same eminent divine, similar 
scenes took place at Valentia, Cordova, Burgos, 
Toledo, and Barcelona. St. Vincent de Fe/rier, 
who was then stirring all Spain with his preaching, 
devoted himself especially to the Jews; and as 
the people zealously seconded the reasoning of the 
saint by massacring those who hesitated, many 
thousands were converted, and if they relapsed 
into Judaism were imprisoned or burned. Scenes 
of this kind took place more than once during the 
fifteenth century, and they naturally intensified 
the traditional hatred, which was still further ag¬ 
gravated by the fact that most of the tax-gatherers 
were Jews. At last the Moorish war, which had 
always been regarded as a crusade, was drawing 
to a close, the religious fervour of the Spanish 
rose to the highest point, and the Inquisition was 
established as its expression. Numbers of con¬ 
verted Jews were massacred; others, who had been 
baptised during past explosions of popular fury, 


58 


Jew-Baiting 


fled to the Moors, in order to practise their rites, 
and at last, after a desperate resistance, were 
captured and burnt alive. The clergy exerted all 
their energies to produce the expulsion of the 
entire race, and to effect this object all the old 
calumnies were revived, and two or three miracles 
invented. 

When we take into consideration all these cir¬ 
cumstances, and the condition of public feeling 
they evince, we can perhaps hardly blame Isabella 
for issuing the decree of banishment against the 
Jews; but at the same time it must be acknowl¬ 
edged that history relates very few measures 
that produced so vast an amount of calamity— 
calamities so frightful, that an old historian has 
scarcely exaggerated them when he describes the 
sufferings of the Spanish Jews as equal to those 
of their ancestors after the destruction of Jeru¬ 
salem. In three short months, all unconverted 
Jews were obliged, under pain of death, to aban¬ 
don the Spanish soil. Although they were per¬ 
mitted to dispose of their goods, they were for¬ 
bidden to carry either gold or silver from Spain, 
and this measure made them almost helpless before 
the rapacity of their persecutors. Multitudes fal¬ 
ling into the hands of the pirates who swarmed 
around the coast, were plundered of all they 
possessed and reduced to slavery; multitudes 
died of famine or of plague, or were murdered 
or tortured with horrible cruelty by the African 
savages, or were cast back by tempests on the 
Spanish coast. Weak women, driven from luxuri¬ 
ous homes among the orange groves of Seville or 
Granada, children fresh from their mothers’ arms, 
the aged, the sick, and the infirm, perished by 


The “Wandering Jew” 


59 


thousands. About 80,000 took refuge in 
Portugal, relying on the promise of the king; 
but even there the hatred of the Spaniards pursued 
them. A mission was organized. Spanish priests 
lashed the Portuguese into fury, and the king was 
persuaded to issue an edict which threw even that 
of Isabella into the shade. All the adult Jews 
were banished from Portugal; but first of all 
their children below the age of fourteen were taken 
from them to be educated as Christians. Then, 
indeed, the cup of bitterness was filled to the brim. 
The serene fortitude with which the exiled people 
had borne so many and such grievous calamities, 
gave way, and was replaced by the wildest par¬ 
oxysms of despair. Piercing shrieks of anguish 
filled the land. Women were known to fling their 
children into deep wells, or to tear them limb from 
limb, rather than resign them to the Christians. 
When at last, childless and broken-hearted, they 
sought to leave the land, they found that the ships 
had been purposely detained, and the allotted time 
having expired, they were reduced to slavery, and 
baptised by force. By the merciful intervention 
of Rome, most of them at last regained their 
liberty, but their children were separated from 
them for ever. A great peal of rejoicing filled 
the Peninsula, and proclaimed that the triumph 
of the Spanish priests was complete.* 

Now, no thoroughgoing Roman infallibilist, 
acquainted with such chapters in the record 
of his Church in this matter, can avoid a 
painful dilemma. I am fully conscious of 

♦ “Rationalism in Europe,” vol. ii, p. 100 ff. (Watts’s 
edition, London, 1910.) 



6o 


J ew-Baiting 


its painfulness, and therefore able to sym¬ 
pathize with the difficulty it presents to an 
ardent partisan like Mr. Belloc. The di¬ 
lemma is this: Either the Church, which is 
infallible in faith and morals, has utterly 
failed and been inexcusably wrong on a great 
moral issue, or else the abominations repeated¬ 
ly committed by Catholics, at the instigation 
of their priests, against Jews must have been 
justified. Historians may present the record 
as one of victimization of Jews and criminally 
perverted and inhuman barbarity by Cath¬ 
olics ; but, from the infallibilist point of view, 
whatever the facts may seem to say, they 
cannot be facts if they amount to a valid 
indictment against the Church. She cannot 
fail; therefore the Jews must have deserved 
what they got. 

That I take to be the real explanation of 
Mr. Belloc’s attitude and tone throughout 
this book. It is not so much that he hates 
the Jews as that he loves his Church, and 
therefore is predisposed to hate all whom she 
has hated, and utterly determined to justify 
whatever she has done. Rome’s infallibility 
in faith and morals being for him an un¬ 
questionable first principle, if any facts ap¬ 
pear to conflict with this initial certainty, 
so much the worse for the facts. 


CHAPTER X. 

CHURCH LOYALTY VERSUS NATIONAL LOYALTY. 

I am aware that another explanation is 
possible and has been urged, though I think 
it deficient in charity and not to be resorted 
to unless upon compulsion. This alternative 
explanation is that the instructed infallibilist 
(though he dislikes admitting it, even to him¬ 
self) knows himself to be exactly that thing 
which he charges the Jew with being; namely, 
a creature of double allegiance, who, what¬ 
ever his protests of patriotism, is only in sem¬ 
blance and not in reality a loyal member 
of the political organism to which he be¬ 
longs. His highest loyalty, in any case 
where loyalties conflict, must necessarily 
be given not to his country but to his 
Church. The authority of the Church is 
divine; that of the State is only human. The 
inspiration of the Church in faith and morals 
(and there is no imaginable political question 
which cannot be brought under the heading 
of morals) is infallible; that of the State is 
not merely fallible, but frequently dictated 
by unmoral or immoral expediency. So that 
in any case wherein the commands of the 
State clash with those of the Church, the 
clear-headed infallibilist cannot hesitate as to 

61 


62 


Jew-Baiting 


which he shall follow. He will obey the Italian 
autocrat, who is God’s speaking-trumpet, and 
give his country’s government the go-by. 

To outsiders, the case will naturally not 
present itself as it does to him. What he 
takes to be the voice of God speaking through 
the Pope, will seem to them nothing but the 
self-regarding expediency of a group of anti¬ 
national politicians. The Jews are charged 
with being a dispersed political organism, liv¬ 
ing among and exploiting other nations for 
their own ends. Does not history prove (so 
the uncharitable outsider will urge, with force) 
that the Roman clerisy is in reality what the 
Jews are thus falsely charged with being? 
Is it not an international secret society, bound 
by inviolable pledges to obey without question 
an authority that brooks no rival? Mr. Bel¬ 
loc himself declares that “the Catholic 
Church” (by which he means the Roman 
Church) “is the conservator of an agelong 
European tradition, and that tradition will 
never compromise with the fiction that a 
Jew can be other than a Jew. Wherever the 
Catholic Church has power, and in proportion 
to its power, the Jewish problem will be re¬ 
cognized to the full.” 

Recognized to the full! Yes; and what this 
means we know from history. Mr. Belloc 


Church Loyalty vs. National Loyalty 63 

thinks that the jews have been providentially 
compelled to retain an unchanging identity; 
but he also believes that the Roman Church 
has been the same throughout all its history, 
and will be ever the same. What this smooth 
phrase covers, therefore, is the threat that, 
if and when she can, his Church will treat 
the Jews again as she has done in the past; 
and how she treated them in the past, Mr. 
Lecky has told us. 

I desire to make it clear, beyond possibility 
of misconception, that I am not bringing this 
charge of divided allegiance against Roman 
Catholics in general. It is undoubtedly the 
logical implication of their position and their 
doctrines. Consistency would require them, 
in the event of the Republic commanding one 
thing and the Church another, to side with 
the Church against the Republic. But his¬ 
tory has repeatedly shown that this measure 
of consistency is not to be counted upon, even 
in the adherents of infallibility. When such 
conflicts have arisen, the mass of Catholics 
(at whatever strain to the logic connecting 
creed with conduct) have sided with their 
country and disobeyed their lord the Pope. 

One out of many signal proofs of this may 
be cited in illustration. In the latter half 
of the sixteenth century, the Pope, acting 


6 \ 


Jew- Baiting 


as the political tool of the King of Spain, 
excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England 
and absolved her subjects from their al¬ 
legiance. When Spain sent her Armada 
against heretical England, it sailed under the 
benediction of the Pope, and God and the 
saints were invoked to bless its mission. The 
charm unaccountably failed to work: Afflavit 
Deus et dissipantur , said the heretical English. 
But the Roman Catholics in England were 
under orders from their Church to side with 
the enemies of their country. With virtual 
unanimity they refused to obey the Pope, and 
rallied with exemplary loyalty to the standard 
of their Queen; and it is one of the glories 
of English history, that the little fleet which 
so magnificently defeated the Spanish Armada 
was commanded by a Roman Catholic ad¬ 
miral, who had spent largely of his own means 
to equip it. 

I cite this familiar fact merely to explain 
why, as a citizen of the Republic, I entertain 
none of those fears of the Roman Church 
which would be in place if men were always 
consistent in acting upon their conscious prin¬ 
ciples. Church loyalty is a very great force, 
but history proves that national loyalty is 
a greater and stronger. The mass of Roman 
Catholics fortunately share that happy in- 


Church Loyalty vs. National Loyalty 65 

consistency, some measure of which is in¬ 
dispensable to make life practicable. “The 
human soul,” says George Eliot, “is hospitable, 
and will entertain conflicting sentiments and 
contradictory opinions with much impartial¬ 
ity.” If ever such a conflict of authorities 
should arise in America as was presented 
to the English Roman Catholics in the six¬ 
teenth century, we may safely trust that our 
Romanist citizens will prove en masse to be 
Americans first and subjects of the Pope 
only secondly. 

Nevertheless, it should be remembered that 
on the side of the Church there has been 
no abandonment and no reduction of the un¬ 
measured claim to implicit obedience, which 
the medieval Papacy advanced at the pinnacle 
of its pretensions. Within the last few 
months, two interesting reminders of this 
have been given to the world. When the 
Bolshevistic tyrants of Russia latelv con¬ 
demned to death certain priests of the Roman 
Church, the Pope, with no less humanity 
than the Protestant world displayed, inter¬ 
vened in the effort to get the murderous deci¬ 
sion changed. The intervention was ad¬ 
mirable; but for us the important point is 
to note the ground on which it was based. 
This was the declaration that the Soviet Gov- 


66 


Jew-Baiting 


ernment had no right to punish Roman priests 
because they were the Pope’s subjects. And 
a few weeks later, when the Spanish Cabinet 
proposed to change their country's constitu¬ 
tion, so as to render possible the severance 
of the connection between Church and State, 
they received through the Apostolic Delegate 
an ultimatum from Rome, prohibiting the 
action. To Americans and Englishmen, lulled 
in a false security, such episodes are so un¬ 
believable that they fail even to catch the 
meaning of the newspaper dispatches that 
relate them. Yet the meaning is as plain as 
a pikestaff. The Pope still claims the right 
to exercise that boundless despotic authority 
over every human soul which was arrogated 
by Boniface VIII, in the famous Bull Unam 
Sane tarn, a document which (greatly to the 
embarrassment of Catholic historians since 
their faith was officially changed in 1870) 
has to be regarded as invested, through the 
circumstances of its utterance, with infal¬ 
libility. 

Now facts like these, so unfamiliar to the 
average Protestant reader, are vividly present 
to the mind of an ultramontane like Mr. 
Belloc. And nobody, however resentful, could 
think of insulting him by questioning the 
absoluteness of his faith in the claims of his 


Church Loyalty vs. National Loyalty 67 

Church. How, then, can it be cause for 
wonder that he should take towards the Jews 
that attitude of fiery hostility, veiled under 
the pretence of friendship, that we find 
throughout his book? 

As we have seen, he is perpetually refer¬ 
ring to Parliamentary scandals in England 
and elsewhere, due to the corruption of 
politicians by Jews: the said Jews being, from 
his point of view, not citizens of the lands 
they inhabit, but consciously and irreducibly 
alien, and systematically working for the in¬ 
terests of the Jewish nation. He discreetly 
refrains from alluding to the fact that charges 
of this kind, when he and his associates were 
rash enough to make them openly against 
Lord Reading and Mr. Lloyd George in the 
Marconi case, were decisively disproved in 
the British Courts, and Mr. Belloc and his 
colleagues had to pay heavy damages for the 
libel of which they were guilty. Yet he and 
Mr. Chesterton go on talking of the Marconi 
scandal as though their refuted version 
of it were unquestioned and notoriously true. 
Even in this book, for all his discretion in 
avoiding names, he cannot refrain from a 
characteristic fling at Sir Herbert Samuel: 

I... .refrain from making comment here. .. . 
upon the strange selection made by the Jews for 


68 


Jew-Baiting 


their first ruler of the Arabs and Christians in 

« 

Palestine. I will do no more than to say that a 
desire to shield the less worthy specimens of 
one’s race is natural and even praiseworthy. One 
may even take a certain glory in that one is able 
to protect them from outsiders. But to give them 
too great a prominence is a mistake, and it is 
indeed deplorable that of the whole world of Jews 
—from crowds of Jews eminent in administration, 
and political science, known for their upright deal¬ 
ing and blameless careers—Mr. Balfour's Jewish 
advisers (whoever they were) should have pitched 
on the author of the Marconi contract and the 
spokesman of the famous declaration in the House 
of Commons that no politician had touched 
Marconi shares. 

The same old story: Lord Balfour in choos¬ 
ing the High Commissioner for Palestine un¬ 
der the British Mandate had no option; he 
perforce obeyed Jewish orders as to the selec¬ 
tion; and Sir Herbert Samuel, whom he thus 
chose, is a liar and the organizer of financial 
frauds. Mr. Belloc knows it infallibly. No 
evidence is required to support his ipse dixit. 


CHAPTER XI. 

THE JEWISH ANSWER TO MR. BELLOC. 

Now, what, if any, are the elements of 
truth in Mr. Belloc’s case, of which Jewish 
citizens of free countries should be advised to 
take account? 

We need not waste time over the question 
of the alleged monopolies. We may grant 
to Mr. Belloc that probably there are in 
Britain and America some fields of trade 
practically monopolized in Jewish hands. In 
this connection we need only point out that 
such things are bad because they are mono¬ 
polies, but not because the monopolists are 
Jews. Their extent is no doubt grossly ex¬ 
aggerated in popular imagination. Economic 
justice and good social order require that 
monopolies which are unnecessary should be 
broken up, and those which are necessary 
should be conducted in the open, under public 
regulation. But only a fanatic can imagine 
that a monopoly in Jewish hands is any worse 
than a monopoly in the hands of Stinnes or 
Rockefeller or Carnegie or Henry Ford, or 
any other Gentile. Let the State, in Britain 
and in the United States, attend to its primary 
function of enforcing even-handed justice, 

69 


7 o 


Jew-Baiting 

the revision of inequitable contracts and the 
strict fulfilment of equitable ones, and this 
evil will be speedily cured. 

Neither has the cloudy talk about secrecy 
and anonymity in financial transactions any 
special point against Jews, since it is a 
universal element of the modern capitalistic 
financial and credit system, and, by Mr. Bel¬ 
loc’s own admission, had grown to great 
dimensions before Jews, in any large num¬ 
bers, had come into the Western world. Evils 
which preceded their arrival, and exist as 
generally among Gentiles as among them, are 
obviously not chargeable to their account. 

But the claim is often made by orthodox 
Jews (e. g. y it is vehemently asserted by the 
Rev. Dr. Gaster) that the Jews are a nation, 
and have a right as such to be established 
in a separate and independent State. Thus 
a main element in Mr. Belloc’s indictment 
is presented to him ready-made by the spokes¬ 
men of Zionism. While this does not justify 
the inferences Mr. Belloc draws as to the 
character and purposes of Jews in general, 
it yet does give to the argument of the anti- 
Semitic fanatic a fair measure of color and 
plausibility. Mr. Belloc’s own chapter on 
Zionism shows how the concession is mani¬ 
pulated by a skilful dialectician. In hands 


Jewish Answer to Mr. Belloc 71 

less skilful and more overtly brutal, it is and 
will be used to justify mob violence and 
deportations. May one not, therefore, once 
again urge upon American Jews the im¬ 
portance of clearing up their own minds and 
declaring themselves upon this subject? Many 
of them, I know, have done so, but it seems 
necessary that others should, and that their 
protest should be worded in unmistakable 
terms. Are they or are they not citizens of 
a Jewish nation? Where, in this world, is the 
anchorage of their hearts? What country 
and what sovereignty is in their consciousness 
clustered about with the sanctities of home 
and patria ? For what land do they live and 
would they die? 

Mr. Belloc is forever talking of the Jew as 
a nomad, Convinced that the world owes him 
this singular privilege of full citizenship in 
any community where he happens for the 
moment to be, while at the same time retain¬ 
ing full citizenship in his own nation.” So 
the slanderous idea is perpetually being in¬ 
sinuated. The Jews are our “guests” and we 
their “hosts.” Mr. Belloc talks as though the 
modern nations had been in Europe longer 
than the Jews, and as though (having most 
of them, as in America, won their position 
by no better right than that of conquest) 


72 


Jew-Baiting 


they had an indefeasible right of tenure and 
exclusive ownership, which no Jewish family, 
even though coeval with them on their soil, 
can ever possibly share. How many genera¬ 
tions, one is moved to wonder, would it take 
to transform the Jewish “guest” into a resi¬ 
dent with the rights of citizenship ? How 
many Jews must devote their lives to the 
service, political, juristic, scientific, literary, 
artistic, of Britain or America, before their 
children can possess the same right as other 
residents who have served less? 

At unexpressed intentions one can only 
guess. But certain it is that had Mr. Belloc 
intended to level against Jews in Western 
lands the deadliest insult he could conceive, 
he would have said precisely what he has 
said about this “host” and “guest” business. 
Consider the position of men of Jewish race 
born in France or England, of parents there 
for generations, speaking perhaps no lan¬ 
guage except that of their native land, know¬ 
ing no more of the Hebrew language or of 
Jewish literature and history than their Gen¬ 
tile neighbors, perhaps not even members of 
a synagogue, yet devoted with an undivided 
loyalty to the land of their birth, living for 
it and ready to die for it. We all know mul¬ 
titudes of such Jews. What is to be their 


Jewish Answer to Mr. Belloc 73 

answer to Jew-baiters of the Belloc type? 
Surely it must be to this purpose: “We know 
nothing of the Jewish ‘nation’ that you talk 
about. If such a nation does exist, we are 
not members of it. We may be Jews by blood 
and by religion (as you, Mr. Belloc, are 
French by blood and Roman Catholic by 
religion), but by nationality and by patriotism 
we are more British (or French) than your¬ 
self.” In other words, if to be a Jew is to be 
a member of a nation, then to the Jew must 
be accorded the same right which is enjoyed 
by every other man, to determine whether 
he will or will not remain a member of that 
nation. Certainly none of the governments 
of Western lands are willing to admit that 
men born on their soil are members of any 
nation but their own. He who is born on 
the soil of the United States is an American 
citizen, and is vested with all the responsibil¬ 
ities as well as the privileges of that citizen¬ 
ship, unless and until he explicitly disclaims 
it; and this he can only do by swearing al¬ 
legiance to another Gentile nation. Birth on 
Britain’s soil makes you a British subject; 
on French, a citizen of the French Republic. 
Every man must be a member of one nation, 
and cannot be a member of more than one. 

But every other man except the Jew can 


74 


Jew-Baiting 


decide for himself to what nation he will be - 
long. This is the one point which is vital; 
yet Mr. Belloc never directly mentions it. 
Indirectly and by implication, he commits 
himself to denying to the Jew this right, 
which he has himself exercised, and with 
which every other man in the modern world 
is endowed by law and public consent, as 
well as by right. The whole anti-Semitic 
argument takes it for granted not only that 
the Jew is a member of a Jewish nation, 
but that he cannot, under any circumstances, 
cease to be so. This is what Mr. Belloc 
means when he tells us that the Roman 
Church “will never compromise with the fic¬ 
tion that a Jew can be other than a Jew.” 

Romanism may say this, but Democracy 
emphatically denies it. The assumption is 
flagrantly untrue, and, as we hardly need re¬ 
minding here, utterly opposed to the Amer¬ 
ican ideal and practice. For we, more than 
other nations, have cause to know that a man 
born in one land may renounce it and be¬ 
come a thoroughly loyal citizen of this coun¬ 
try. The thing has happened here in hun¬ 
dreds of thousands of cases. By what right, 
then, can Mr. Belloc assume that, while every¬ 
body else can do this, the Jew cannot? 

This I take to be the crucial point. The 


Jewish Answer to Mr. Belloc 


75 


great harm of the Zionist campaign consists 
in its assertion of the historically false and 
psychologically preposterous belief that there 
is a Jewish nation, of which all Jews are 
members. I advise my readers of Jewish 
descent to make war upon that assertion. 
Or if they concede, for the sake of argu¬ 
ment, that there is or some day may be such 
a nation, they should make it unmistakably 
clear that they do not belong to it, and have 
no desire to join it. They should repudiate 
Mr. Belloc’s ecclesiastical myth, which rep¬ 
resents them as the victims of a special ex¬ 
ercise of divine predestination. If the world 
insists upon saying, what Mr. Belloc and Dr. 
Gaster say, that to be a Jew is to be not 
the scion of a race, nor the adherent of a 
religion, but the member of a nation, then 
men of the Hebrew race, who know them¬ 
selves to be in heart and soul citizens of Am¬ 
erica or France or Britain, must adjust them¬ 
selves to the illogic of the situation, and 
deny that they are Jews. In doing this they 
will only do what Mr. Belloc himself has 
done with respect to France, and I with 
respect to Great Britain. If he and I have 
exercised self-determination in the matter of 
our national allegiance, how can he or I deny 


76 


Jew-Baiting 


to others the power or the right to do what 
we have done? 

Nationality, he says, is the crux of the 
situation. So be it. I so far agree with 
him as to be convinced, from wide experience, 
that any pretence that Jews, in the mass, 
are either better or worse than Gentiles, in 
the mass, is nonsense. Born, multitudes of 
them, of ancestors modified for many genera¬ 
tions by the same environments as we Gen¬ 
tiles, they represent approximately the same 
average of character and culture as we. If I 
should undertake the invidious task of analys¬ 
ing my own circle of friends and acquain¬ 
tances, it is quite certain that truth would 
compel me to testify that the average of char¬ 
acter, culture, and personal honor among 
my Jewish friends is ( fully as high as among 
the Gentiles I am privileged to know. And 
of this I am certain: that when it comes to 
national pride, loyalty and patriotism, the 
British and American Jews I have known have 
been not one whit behind their Gentile fellow- 
citizens. 

In these days of psychological upheaval 
and moral bewilderment, entailed by the 
earthquake of war, race prejudice, even here 
in America, though less here than elsewhere, 
is a terrible menace. And Mr. Belloc, as I 


Jewish Answer to Mr. Belloc 77 

think I have shown, is its cleverest exploiter, 
the most dangerous promoter of the disasters 
he professedly seeks to avert. The division 
he desires to bring about,—the re-establish¬ 
ment of the ghetto, and the branding of the 
Jew as a foreigner,—would not only increase 
the likelihood of further war, but would neces¬ 
sarily tend to postpone indefinitely that peace¬ 
ful federation of peoples which is desired by 
all believers in liberty and humanity. For 
these reasons, I, who have no drop of Jewish 
blood in my veins, but believe in the spiritual 
equality of all men, enter my earnest protest 
against the mischievous undertaking upon 
which Mr. Belloc has misdirected his com¬ 
manding talents. 


BOOKS 

of UNUSUAL INTEREST 

Published and Printed by 

THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS 


Jew-Baiting—An Old Evil Newly Camouflaged 

By Horace James Bridges. 

A fitting answer to Hilaire Belloc’s book, “The Jews.” 

Paper cover, 50c. Cloth, 75c. 

The Ways of the Gods By Algernon S. Crapsey. 

Written in simple English, the hook is in reality 
the romance of the gods, and apart from the in¬ 
formation it imparts, it is an entrancing story. 

$3.00 

Savonarola By Gregory Weinstein. 

A concise and vivid story of the famous Italian re¬ 
former and martyr, and a brief history of Florence in 
the XV. century. Illustrated. 

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Subjective Concepts of Humans 

By John J. Donnelly 

The sentient beings' of the visible world are the origin, 
the basis, the prototypes from which spring the invisible 
world of intelligences or spirits known to man. 

$3.00 

Chinese Family System By Sing Ging Su. 

The work is a scientific analysis of the Chinese Family 
system which has long been waited for by the occidental 
students of Chinese civilization. 


$2.00 




Faith and Health By Solomon Cohen. 

The true way of attaining Health thru Faith. 

$1.50 

Master & Mate By Frank Krause, U. S. N., Ret. 

Questions and Answers for examinations', with lectures 
on Geography, Astronomy, Compensation of Compass, 
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$2.50 

Pilot Guide of New York Bay and Harbor. 

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Conscience and Success By Fernand E. d’Humy. 

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Education for Moral Growth 

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This book is addressed not only to teachers, but to 
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D. Appleton & Co., $2.50 


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OTHER BOOKS 

by 

HORACE J. BRIDGES 

As I Was Saying: A Sheaf of Essays and Discourses. 

On Becoming an American: Some Meditations of a 
Newly Naturalized Immigrant. 

Our Fellow Shakespeare: How Everyman May 

Enjoy His Works. 

(All the above published by Marshall Jones, 212 
Sumner Street, Boston, AJass., and to be obtained of 
all booksellers .) 


Some Outlines of the Religion of Experience. 

(Macmillan) 

Criticisms of Life: Studies in Faith, Hope and 

Despair. 

(Houghton, Mifflin) 









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